"The letter was removed years ago from the Cavs.com website, but over the last week, it was discovered that it still existed from this external link to a stagnant archived page," Cavaliers director of communications Tad Carper told SB Nation. "It was on the content management system platform that was used back in 2010."

I...don't know what this means? The URL that was working last night was the same as the original four years ago; it was never "removed." So this is, I think, Carper's way of saying they just forgot about it.

Thus, everyone within the organization proceeded as if nothing strange was going on. But when James' free agency started to kick into gear, one employee noticed a spike in traffic to a page that was believed to be purged from the Internet. A decision was made to delete the letter again, but the process was more complex because the team did not have direct access to the site's old CMS. Thus, the team had to ask the league to do it for them.

As someone who works almost exclusively in the medium of Kinja™, I am sympathetic. But it's not hard to picture Rich Paul explaining this to LeBron James. They said they forgot they published a letter from your old boss badmouthing you for leaving. Then they said they didn't know how to take it down. And then LeBron telling Paul to just forget this whole Cleveland thing.

Barry Petchesky

As of last night, the Cavs' official website still hosted owner Dan Gilbert's hysteric, petulant open letter to Cavs fans, hastily composed in the aftermath of LeBron James announcing he was leaving for Miami. It would have been exactly four years old tomorrow. It has now, finally, been deleted. Comic Sans is dead; long live Comic Sans.

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I think we need to take a step back and appreciate just how bananas that letter's existence is. The rant, touching on everything from loyalty to rebirth, and sprinkled with a healthy misuse of quotation marks, would have been bizarre enough if it were simply posted to the RealGM forums—or, as Craggs noted at the time, "wrapped around a brick". But to come from an NBA owner, obviously typed out in a huff within hours after James's announcement, was glorious evidence that being rich and powerful doesn't make you less unhinged.

(If you're too young to remember, Gilbert's personal guarantee that Cleveland would win a title before LeBron was just as funny then as it is now. But in his defense, the Cavs lead the NBA in draft lotteries won.)

"I would've reworded the language in The Letter, but I don't regret sending a letter out to our fan base. People forget the letter was not to LeBron, it was to our fan base. If I had to do it again, for sure, I would've reworded several parts of it. But I think it definitely needed a strong statement from me at that time. I keep a couple binders on my desk and I have a binder of the responses to The Letter from the people of Cleveland. There's thousands, maybe 2,000 from every facet of life, from CEOs of big companies to hand-written letters from 94-year-old ladies, from street sweepers to policemen and firemen. The response went way beyond. For some reason, it appealed to this generational Cleveland thing. If you want to talk about books, someone should publish all the responses to The Letter. It was like, 'We're from Cleveland and we've been rejected.'"

Though the original letter is gone, the (nutty, nutty) sentiment remains. But that's not enough. Thankfully, Matthew Torinograbbed a copy from the Cavs' website last night, just before it was deleted. Here it is, preserved forever in its original form, because crazy isn't quite crazy enough unless it's in Comic Sans.